For years we looked out for him, a very small black squirrels without a tail.  He behaved as no other squirrels did in our presence.  He knew us and he trusted us.  To a degree.  He was a charmer.  Above all, he trusted us to reliably have peanuts in our possession.  We always saved the three-chambered peanuts, the really big ones, for him.  And often he would scamper toward us; we could see him doing that starting from a distance until he swiftly closed that distance then he stood right beside us.  Expectantly, dancing about in his eagerness to achieve his goal.  Peanuts.

We never made any attempt to persuade him to take peanuts directly from our hands.  He was a wild, urban-woodland squirrel and we feared he might became too trusting, too 'tame', and fall victim to the pursuit of a dog determined to view him as prey.  Most dogs run after squirrels, challenged by their presence, and most dogs cannot catch them as they scamper quickly up trees, and even if a dog confronted a squirrel at close quarters, most would likely not kill a squirrel, but some might.

We don't know what happened to little Stumpy.  We certainly miss him.  We miss his bold approaches to us.  That he would take the proffered peanut, remove himself a short distance, withdraw the nuts from the shell, consume them and come back for another.  He might do this up to three times until satiation, and he would move on and we would too to re-commence our daily ravine walk. 

Several years after we first became acquainted with Stumpy there was another squirrel, in yet another part of the ravine forest, without a full tail and we named it Stumpette.  We still encounter Stumpette, but it's been months since we last saw Stumpy.

We mourn his absence, despite its inevitability.